VisionTek Racer 120GB SSD Review - PAGE 2

The Racer Series solid state drives come packaged in a large black box. On the front of the box is the product sticker which lists the drives capacity, form factor and SATA interface, and uses different color schemes depending on drive capacity. The 120GB drive we received is black and red, while the 240GB model is blue and red, and the 480GB model comes in black and grey.

The reverse side of the packaging only has the VisionTek logo at the bottom and an opening at the top that allows the inner box to be easily removed. The inner box stores the actual drive and accessories. The drives are bundled with a 2.5" to 3.5" converter that will allow them to be installed in larger drive bays, and a coupon for VisionTek's Universal SSD Installation kit. Essentally this kit is a hard drive cloning system that works via USB port, allowing anyone to clone a hard drive without even opening a case.

Externally the Racer drives use a standard 2.5" grey enclosure with a decal sticker on both the front and back.The 2.5" form factor allows the Racer Series drives to be installed into any laptop or a case with a 2.5" bracket. However, if your case doesn't support 2.5" drives, VisionTek has included a bracket that allows the SSD to be mounted into a 3.5" drive bay without modification. The drive also has product sitckers on both the front and the back. The front sticker lists all the same information that was on the front of the box, while the back has the serial number and a warning regarding the warranty.

All the drives in the Racer series are powered by the second generation SandForce SSD controller (SF-2281) and supports the 6Gbps SATA III interface. The drives also use 24nm Toshiba Toggle Mode MLC NAND, and feature read and write speeds of 550MB/s and 520MB/s. In addition, the Racer Series also features excellent 4k file write performance of 85,000 IOPS, which puts it on par with the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS SSD.

The SandForce SSD controller also offers native TRIM support for garbage collection used by supporting operating systems such as Microsoft Windows 7, as well as Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with 32 commands, and all the exclusive DuraClass technologies we have come to expect from SandFroce drives. While the Racer Series drives are based on the SATA 6Gb/s interface, they are all backwards compatible with SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 1.5Gbs interfaces. The drives also supports error checking and correction (ECC) algorithm on the chips without placing any burden on the host controller, which paired with RAISE (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements) helps enhance the reliability of the drive. As mentioned earlier, garbage collection is included, which essentially works as an internal defragmentation tool to keep the SSD clean of unused data.

The VisionTek Racer SSD has a total of eight 24nm multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips. The NAND selected for the Racer Series is 24nm Toshiba Toggle Mode MLC NAND flash and with eight chips on the PCB, the SF-2281 controller will be using all 8 channels. The memory modules on the PCB are arranged in rows of two on both sides of the board, and each NAND chip has a capacity of 16GB. Additionally the over-provisioning for these models is around 6%, so the final storage capacity will be slightly under the listed capacity of the drive.